How to Plan Delivery Rounds in Excel (and Where It Breaks)

Step 1: Set up one row per drop

Start with a single sheet where each row is one drop for the day. The columns that matter:

• Customer name and a stable customer ID
• Full address and postcode. Consistent postcodes are what everything else depends on
• Order size in the unit you load by: cages, crates, trays, pallets or kilograms
• Delivery window: earliest and latest time, in separate columns, as proper Excel times
• Drop time in minutes (how long the driver spends there)
• Round, which you fill in yourself in the next step

Step 2: Group drops into rounds

Sort by postcode district (the first half of the postcode) to get a rough geographic grouping, then assign a round to each block. A SUMIF on order size by round tells you each round's load. Compare it against the van's capacity and move drops between rounds until each one fits. Conditional formatting that turns a round red when it's over capacity saves a lot of squinting.

This is the step where most of the waste creeps in. Postcode districts are a decent proxy for distance but not a good one. Two drops either side of a district boundary can be minutes apart, and two in the same district can be half an hour apart.

Step 3: Order the drops and check the times

Within each round, order the drops the way the driver would run them, usually from memory or with a map open. Then add a running clock. Start time, plus estimated travel to the first drop, plus drop time, gives the departure time from that drop, and so on down the round. Compare each estimated arrival with the customer's window column and flag any that miss.

The travel-time estimates are the weak point. Most spreadsheets use a guessed number of minutes between drops, which is fine until a round crosses a town centre at 8am.

Where it breaks

Excel isn't the problem. The problem is that planning rounds is a search, and a spreadsheet can only check the plan you give it. It can't look for a better one. You'll feel it when:

• The orders change every day, so yesterday's rounds are the wrong starting point and rebuilding them takes an hour or more each evening
• A lot of drops have tight windows, and fixing one late drop pushes another one late
• You're moving drops between more than three or four vans, and every move means re-checking loads and times on two rounds
• Only one person really understands the spreadsheet, so a day off means a bad plan

Keep the spreadsheet, lose the manual search

Route planning software doesn't have to replace your spreadsheet. vRouted imports it: one row per round with the addresses after it (see CSV import). It then splits drops across vans by capacity and sequences each round against windows, drop times and shift length, which is the search a spreadsheet can't do. If you run foodservice or bakery rounds, see how that works in the foodservice wholesale and bakery and fresh produce guides, or compare the options in the route planning guide.